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Carbon Date Repository
Introduction Below is the general repository for radiocarbon dates from the Central Plains. Please add any information you have. Please do not remove any information that is not obviously out of place unless it has been discussed and agreed to on the Discussion Page. If you have dates from other sources such as TL, hydration, or archaeomag, please add them to the other dates repository page here. User Guide Intent and Scope This table is meant to compile all available radiocarbon dates for the Central Plains subregion of the US Great Plains and immediately adjacent areas only. Roughly speaking, this can be thought of as the area betweenthe Missouri River trench to the north and east, the foothills of the Rockies to the west, and the Arkansas (Canadian maybe?) River to the south. Please do not add dates from any other part of the world. Dates from all cultural phases are welcome. Please fill any information you have regarding the dates and feel free to update missing information for dates entered by other people. The Notes field at the right side of the table is intended to capture oral tradition, institutional knowledge, opinion, navel-gazing, etc regarding pertinent information not captured in the other columns. For example, if you know that a date was misreported, a sample contaminated, or you feel that a partcular date is especially reliable, let us know and let us know your reasoning. Given that these comments might be especially long, it might be useful to simply put a linked number for a footnote in the field and your full comment in the comments section below. If you don't know how to do that, just enter the full text of your comment and someone else will move it to a footnote. Evaluation of Data It may also be useful as the table grows to visually encode reliability of individual dates. I would propose changing the text of unreliable dates to italic or possibly red color. Be sure to include a note explaining your reasoning for considering a date to be unreliable. Alternately, we could consider a numeric rating for confidence for individual dates as another column. Contributing to the Repository Detailed instructions on using the wiki are in progress; some general pointers can be found here. To begin, just click the big green button at the top that says "edit," click inside a cell, and start typing. Then hit the "Save Page" button at the bottom and you'll be set. If you prefer, feel free to send me (Dan Pugh) dates in table format and I will eventually get around to updating the table. I'm not interested in posting my email here for every spambot in the world, you can find it on the directory at cmich.edu. This wiki is publicly available. Please take that into consideration if sharing dates that have not been published. Hereis a link to the official Wikia help page to get you started. Thank you for your contribution! Reading & Sorting the Table Each column of the table is sortable. Click on the hourglass looking symbol in each column header to change the sort. Text that is colored green is linked. This is most common in the bibliographic reference and notes columns. Clicking that text will take you to more complete comments and reference information. Downloading Data There are some fairly complicated ways to transform the entire table into a usable spreadsheet file and I (pughd) am currently looking for a tool that will allow users to easily export a txt or Excel file. For now I recommend that you simply highlight data and use the copy function (ctrl+c) then paste (ctrl+v) into Excel or some other spreadsheet program. You will notice that copying only part of the table will result in an unusable paste job. For now the best way is to place your cursor outside the table entirely and drag it over the table, maybe even including some outside characters. This is awkward, but it seems to get the table formatting that way. I'll update as soon as I get a better widget for this. Date Repository References List full information for items in the "Primary Reference" column here Awesome, Professor 2025. "Charred Rhubarb remains of future archaeology." Journal of Unlikely Archaeology 13(7)1-3. Beck 1998... Comments Please use this area to include detailed comments as footnotes from the "Notes" field in the table. 1. I am highly suspicious of this date since the lab has never processed any other samples. Further I've never agreed with the taxon "Rhubarb" and it is unlikely that intact rhubarb from the future was found in a cache pit. Editing The Table You can edit the table itself much like an Excel table. Adding Data 1. Click the "Edit" button to enter editing mode 2. Click in a blank cell and enter relevant data (See "Adding Rows and Columns" below if no empty rows are available) 3. Press the "Save Page" button at the bottom Adding Rows and Columns 1. Click the "Edit" button to enter editing mode 2. Right-click inside an existing cell 3. Highlight "Row" or "Column" in the pull-down menu and another menu will appear 4. Select desired action such as "Insert Row After" 5. You can now enter data in your new field 6. Press "Save Page" button at the bottom.